The sibling comments give the top-level answer. In addition, expanding on @Pissompons's note -- make gives you job-level parallelism for free with constructs l

The sibling comments give the top-level answer. In addition, expanding on @Pissompons's note -- make gives you job-level parallelism for free with constructs like: make -j 24 transform which will (if possible/allowed by the dependence structure in the Makefile) run 24 jobs at once to bring "transform" up to date. So for instance, if "transform" depends on a bunch of targets, one for each month across a decade, you get 24-way parallelism for free. It's kind of like gnu "xargs -P", but embedded within the make job-dispatcher.